I am firmly in the camp that using the phrase “China virus” is racist on its face and that anyone that uses it is doing so to parrot Trump who is IMO, a racist. But when I hear the phrases “UK variant”, “Brazilian variant”, or “South African variant”, I don’t think of racism at all. I prefer to be consistent in my thinking and I’m having difficulty justifying my thoughts.
I’m left with the conclusion that “China virus” isn’t in and of itself a racist phrase but that there is an underlying message of racism being sent with its usage. I considered that “UK variant” might not be racist since the UK is predominantly white. I then rejected that notion because South Africa clearly isn’t. I don’t know about the ethnic makeup of Brazil and I’m too lazy to google it.
It’s contextual. We are at a time of significant tension with the country of China; we have a large population of Chinese-Americans, who are in danger of being scapegoated, even indirectly, as somehow responsible for either the virus or the greater problems that our country faces from the government of China; and the virus came about during the administration of a president who had engaged in racial scapegoating in the past.
It’s not contextual. The WHO decided 5 years ago to stop naming pandemics after locations because it stigmatizes said locations unfairly. They don’t have such a rule for variants.
I wasn’t trying to stomp all over you by saying that, I should hasten to mention - the link that you posted is useful information to know, but I don’t think it really addresses the larger scope of why it might or might not be racist to refer to a virus with an ethnic or nationality-related name.
Well, certainly Trump was happy to have a racist spin on it. It also helped it look like it was China’s fault, thereby getting himself off the hook for his part of the problem.
The official naming convention does have relevance in that the virus was not named China Virus, it is called the SARS-cov-2. No one in authority used China Virus to discuss COVID-19. It only started being called the China Virus in order to amplify its origin and cast aspersions on Chinese people.
So the official naming convention was used (no regional names) and the name was actively subverted for racist reasons.
The term UK variant doesn’t have that same history or context.
I’m no Trumper and Trump most certainly intended his rhetoric to be xenophobic and racist for political purposes. But research and reporting is starting to indicate that this virus was more likely to have been lab grown and escaped than naturally emerging in nature. If so, I would be far less resistant to labelling this the China Virus since, you know, it wasn’t just a fate of geography.
But naming diseases, including variants, after a place is always bad practice, if only because it often is later determined that the real origin was elsewhere.
These days the virus is everywhere on Earth. It is now a force of Nature, just like the wind or the flu or volcanoes. it is not under human control anywhere except in NZ and to a lesser degree Australia (and maybe someplace else I’ve missed).
The e.g. UK or South African folks have nothing to do with the emergence of a mutation. They’re naturally happening everywhere and will continue to do so until we stuff this thing back in the box.
The whole point of “China virus” was that term was coded shorthand for “Chinese government-caused virus”. I don’t see it as racist in the slightest.
But it totally is nationalist. It’s anti-PRC and pro-USA!!1! MAGA!!. And that’s what’s wrong with it. It was always ambiguous whether Trump & company thought the virus was Chinese government created or was just let to grow out of control by Chinese government secrecy, malfeasance, and/or incompetence. Of course consistency of message was never one of Trump’s strong suits, nor one of his administration’s.
The official term for a variant won’t be e.g. “UK variant”. But at least for us spectators these kinds of names will work for awhile. Once there’s 40 variants (later this year), we’ll end up using something else. 'Cause for damn sure the one thing the e.g. UK variant won’t do is stay within the UK.
I’m not a literary critic but that extremely detail laden yet story painting style often leaves me feeling like I’m being conned. That “what if” article doesn’t indicate to me that “research and reporting is starting to indicate that this virus was more likely to have been lab grown”. Maybe if you could quote a specific bit. It’s kind of a slog.
It is a slog (though interesting in parts), and I’m by no means trying to argue that it’s the truth. My original comment probably misrepresented my position here a bit. I think a fairer position is that we don’t know for sure if it’s lab grown or naturally evolved, but the early garbage from Trump has made it almost impossible to seriously investigate the lab grown theory without getting shouted down as a QAnon shitheel.
The short version of the argument is that the original progenitor of the virus was from a cave in Mojiang in 2012 and came from batshit. This virus wasn’t SARS-CoV-2 but it’s an ancestor. It was studied in several labs. Somehow this mutated a whole lot in a very short period of time. This type of thing is pretty unlikely in nature and if it did happen you’d typically see examples of infections of those various intermediate strains as it transformed from version A to D. The original pangolin theory has been debunked and we don’t have any idea what animal(s) facilitated the transition from bats to people. It’s circumstantial at best, but at this point so is the natural evolution theory without an explanation for how it evolved so much without leaving any traces.
Just a note, that article was written by an essayist and novelist. Not a scientist, doctor, or journalist. It’s a speculative essay that’s “just asking questions”.
”I’m just asking, Is it a complete coincidence that this outbreak happened in the one city in China with a BSL-4 lab?”
I don’t think it’s even an attempt at being scholarly. It’s an interesting article, but I don’t think it’s something to take seriously.
His conclusion is that it’s more likely it occurred naturally than in a lab. Whether it turns out to have come from a lab or the wild, it doesn’t seem accurate at this point to say
The ending of your linked article:
Let me be clear: this does NOT prove that CoV2 was synthesized in the laboratory. Yes, as we have seen above, from a technical standpoint, it would not be difficult for a modern virologist to create such a strain. But there is no direct evidence that anyone did this, and strange coincidences cannot pass for circumstantial evidence. On balance, the current chances against this are still higher than for the natural origins of CoV2. Moreover, even if CoV2 was indeed an unfortunate lab leak, the scientists themselves are not to blame, as they were working within the established international laws and guidelines on such research. Now, those who might be trying to cover up that leak, that’s a different story.